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1 Comparative Legal Histories Workshop Department of Sociology Comparative Legal Histories Workshop: Colonial/Postcolonial India and Mandatory Palestine/Israel Stanford Law School Faculty Lounge June 6, 2011 Description In recent years, an impressive body of scholarship has emerged on colonial legal history. Some of this work has focused on Indian and Israeli legal history. While both contemporary Indian and Israeli law are in some senses a product of English law, many additional legal sources, including religious and customary law, have played a significant role in shaping the corpus of law in both countries. This history has yielded complex pluralistic legal orders which faced, and still face, similar problems, including the ongoing effects of the British colonial legacy and postcolonial partition, tensions between secularism and religion, and also the desire to absorb universalizing western culture while maintaining some elements of tradition. The goal of our workshop is to bring together a group of legal historians interested in comparative colonial histories who are studying different aspects of the history of Indian and Israeli law. The workshop will be a one-day informal gathering that would combine a discussion of trends in comparative colonial legal history with an opportunity for participants to present their research projects. Our objective is to create a forum where legal historians who may not necessarily be in dialogue with one another can interact, exchange ideas, and perhaps even begin collaborative research projects. The workshop is organized by Assaf Likhovski (Tel Aviv University) Renisa Mawani (UBC) and Mitra Sharafi (UW Law School). It is funded by the David Berg Institute for Law and History at Tel Aviv University, the Institute for Legal Studies, University of Wisconsin Law School, and the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, and hosted by Stanford Law School. 1 Program 08:00 – Minibus will pick-up participants from the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. We will meet at the front desk at 07:45. 09:00-10:00 Breakfast at the Faculty Lounge, Stanford Law School. 10:00-11:00 - Introductory Session: Indian and Israeli Legal History Co-Chairs: Marc Galanter (Wisconsin) & Ron Harris (Tel Aviv) Reading materials: India: Rajeev Dhavan, "The Indian Subcontinent: An Overview of Indian Law," in Stanley N. Katz, ed., The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, online edition accessed on 3 Jan. 2011). Israel: Ron Harris, Alexandre Kedar, Pnina Lahav & Assaf Likhovski, "Israeli Legal History: Past and Present," in Ron Harris et al. eds., The History of Law in a Multicultural Society: Israel 1917-1967 (Dartmouth UK: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 1-26. Comparative Legal History: Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 127-166. 11:00-11:15 - Break 11:15-12:15 – Transnational Movements and Transplantations Renisa Mawani (UBC), Between Colonial India and the Diaspora: Racial Circuits of Legality across the Pacific James Jaffe (Wisconsin), Justice, Fairness, and Empire: Informal Dispute Resolution in England and Colonial India, 1780-1850 Assaf Likhovski (Tel Aviv), The Universal and the Particular in Income Tax Legislation in Mandatory Palestine 12:15-12:30 - Break 12:30-13:50 - Crime and Criminal Law and Procedure Binyamin Blum (Stanford), Rules of Colonial Difference: The Fate of the Indian Codes in Mandate Palestine Yoram Shachar (IDC Herzliya), Raj, Mandate and State: The influence of the Indian Penal Code on the Criminal Law of Israel 2 Elizabeth Kolsky (Villanova), The Law of the Colonial Frontier and the State of Exception: British India’s North-West Frontier Mitra Sharafi (Wisconsin), Medical Jurisprudence in British India 13:50-14:30 - Lunch 14:30-15:30 – Family and Religious Law Chandra Mallampali (Westmont College), Escaping the Grip of Personal Law in Colonial India Ashwini Tambe (Toronto), Girlhood in the Law in Modern India Daphne Barak-Erez (Tel Aviv), Symbolic Constitutionalism: On Sacred Cows and Abominable Pigs 15:30-15:45 - Break 15:45-16:45– Markets, Corporations, Trusts Ritu Birla (Toronto), The Nomos of the Globe: Legal Worlds of Capital Ron Harris (Tel Aviv), On the Transplantation of British Company Law in Post-Ottoman Palestine and in the Empire in General Adam Hofri-Winogradow (Hebrew University), Zionist Settlers and the English Private Trust in Mandate Palestine 16:45-17:00 - Break 17:00-18:00 - Law and the Postcolonial State Rohit De (Princeton), A Republic of Writs: Litigious Citizens, the Nehruvian State and the Rule of Law in India Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar (Haifa), The British, Indian and Pakistani sources of the Israeli Absentee Property Act of 1950 Yifat Holzman-Gazit (College of Management, Rishon Lezion), Israel’s Land Expropriation Law and the Legacy of the Colonial Land Acquisition Ordinance 18:00-18:30 - Concluding Remarks 3 18:30 Minibus will take participants back to the Westin St. Francis, stopping on the way at San Francisco Airport (SFO). Participants who are going to the airport after the workshop can bring their luggage and store it at the law school. Please remember to pick it up and bring it to the Faculty Lounge at 17:30 (the facilities staff at the law school leave at 18:00). General Information: 1. Each speaker will have ten minutes to present an outline of her or his project, followed by ten minutes for questions and comments. 2. The workshop's website can be found at http://www.law.tau.ac.il/Eng/?CategoryID=430. The website contains the reading materials for the first session and also a list of some secondary sources on the legal history of Mandatory Palestine and Israel. 3. Reading materials on South Asian legal history can be found at: A. http://hosted.law.wisc.edu/wordpress/sharafi/# (Mitra Sharafi's South Asian Legal History Resources webpage, see especially the “bibliography” section). B. http://www.soci.ubc.ca/index.php?id=13495 (Renisa Mawani’s bibliography on Law and the South Asian Diaspora). C. http://marcgalanter.net/Documents/indianlaw.htm (Marc Galanter's website). 4. Administrative information: A. Administrative Organizer at Stanford: Patricia "Pat" Adan Stanford Law School 559 Nathan Abbott Way Stanford CA 94305-8610 Tel: (650) 723-5173 Fax: (650) 725-0253 Email: [email protected] B. Assaf Likhovski (cell) +972-546-779555 or Mitra Sharafi (cell) 608-354-9141. 4 The Abstracts I. Transnational Movements and Transplantations Renisa Mawani (University of British Columbia, Dept. of Sociology, [email protected]), Between Colonial India and the Diaspora: Racial Circuits of Legality across the Pacific This project traces the entangled histories of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial India and the Indian diaspora. Focused on the 1914 journey of the Komagata Maru, a Japanese steam-ship carrying 376 labourers from Punjab, the larger research of which this is a part draws from archival records in Canada, London, India, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, and approaches the ship’s route as a transnational journey at the high mark of British imperialism. Specifically, my interest lies in tracking the circuits of people, law, legality, and racial truths between India, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Canada. The specific paper that I will discuss at the workshop will address a small aspect of this work and is inspired by questions I addressed in my recent book, Colonial Proximities (2009). This book explores the dynamic encounters between aboriginal peoples, Chinese migrants, people of mixed-race ancestry, and Europeans, and how these encounters were narrated and documented through legal struggles over liquor, prostitution, and cannery labour. Extending my interest in indigenous/ non-European contacts, this paper tracks the specters of Indigeneity that were mobilized both by Canadian authorities and by British Indian subjects in struggles over Indian migration and imperial inclusion/ exclusion. While the Komagata Maru’s arrival was depicted as potentially endangering the legal status of aboriginal peoples in Canada, the ship’s supporters in Lahore asserted their own conceptions of Indigeneity through the figure of the African. This was a claim to their racial superiority, legal sophistication, and as evidence of their readiness to join the wider imperial polity. By tracing the racial circuits of legality and Indigeneity that were mobilized on both sides of the Pacific and that moved between India, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Canada, this paper asks how global histories might unsettle our prevailing conceptions of racial-legal force beyond the familiar binaries of national/ global, metropole/ colony, native/ white. James Jaffe (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Dept. of History, [email protected]), Justice, Fairness, and Empire: Informal Dispute Resolution in England and Colonial India, 1780-1850 This project examines the impact of the transnational transference of informal dispute resolution practices and, concomitantly, comparative ideals of justice, between England and early colonial India. It does so through the historical analysis of the attempts of the East India Company to adapt, combine, and often conflate the arbitration practices of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England with the so-called “panchayat system” of in the colonial Bombay Presidency. In contrast to the received interpretation of the role and functioning of dispute resolution during the colonial period, this project argues that the attempt to translate and
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